5 Introduction Africans who were believed to be ‘native’ to a place over those other Africans who had migrated there more recently – in­cluding those who had moved with the encouragement or coercion of the colonial government. There were clear differences in the structures of government introduced by the different colonial powers, with the civil-law countries favouring a more assimilationist approach, and the British preferring where they could to co-opt pre-existing institutions to the system that became known as indirect rule. But there were also commonalities. Institutions were created that for the most part followed the logic of what Europeans called ‘tribe’, grouping together people whom the colonizers (and their anthropologists) decided had a common language and culture. ‘Chiefs’ of these groups, approved or ­created by the colonizers, were authorized to take lower-level decisions affecting their own ethnic subjects. The higher-level courts and administrators backed up this authority (so long as there was no challenge to the colonizers’ power), based where necessary on their own interpretation of the relevant ‘customary’ law. Individuals who found themselves outside the geographical zone of the ‘tribe’ to which it was determined they belonged could be doubly disadvantaged. These migrants benefited neither from the legal rights given those subject to ‘European’ law, nor from the ‘customary’ protections given those who could make a claim on a particular ‘tribal’ leader.3 At independence, the laws of the new states were designed to reassert the equal rights of all races and ethnicities. New citizenship laws were adopted, largely based on models from the power that had colonized them, but using the versions that had applied at home to their own full citizens rather than in their colonies. As in other regions of the world, these new laws generally based the right to citizenship on a combination of descent from parents who themselves were citizens and the fact of birth in the country. Though gender bias was a common feature of these laws – as it was at the time in the European states – formal equality between races was the norm. The term ‘native’ itself was reappropriated in the former British colonies to be a term